Perhaps because most of that third who don't pay can't even make a living. It's like getting blood out of a rock.
If that were true, then you'd expect the same pattern to be pretty consistent over time, right? But it's not - it used to be the case that more wage-earners paid at least something. Even low wage-earners should be paying some taxes, if for no other reason to make sure they have a stake in tax policy.
The rest of the third who don't pay ARE top wage earners who have found loopholes.
That may be true, but it's an extraordinarily small class of people. You might find a few rich retirees who have all their money in municipal bonds and live off the tax free interest, but even they are effectively paying taxes by accepting the lower interest rates on those bonds. (And these people, I might add, are not WAGE EARNERS.)
Why shouldn't they give something back to society?
If your point is that rich people should pay more taxes than poor, then OK. My point is that they already do, vastly more. If your point is that we should clean up the tax code to prevent loopholes, then I couldn't agree more. But this has nothing to do with Obama's vs. McCain's tax plans, neither of which looks likely to reduce the 67,000 pages of the current U.S. Tax Code.
That's bullshit. Insurance companies won't sell you the same health coverage, at the same price, on your own.
I didn't say they would. You'd still have $17k (minus taxes) to buy health coverage, and even now you can get a pretty damn good individual policy for that.
However, as long as some people get it collectively through their employer, everyone else is still getting screwed in comparison.
Please. That's bullshit. The system is currently set up to favor employer-provided health care because that's almost the only game in town. Open up the market a bit and there's no reason whatsoever individual health insurance won't be as competitively priced as individual car insurance. Do you think your car insurance should be paid for by your employer?
Considering that the average CEO makes something like 400x the average worker in America...
Great, but most of the people Obama considers "rich" aren't CEOs and aren't making 400x the average worker. So this point is entirely irrelevant.
The point that IS relevant, to me at least, is that already about 60% of our taxes are paid by the top 5% of wage earners. Over a third of all wage-earners pay no income tax at all. How is this remotely fair? Obama wants to shift the burden even more onto the top wage-earners, and calls that "more fair". Rubbish.
On the other hand, with McCain, he's wanting to start taxing heath benefits on employees rather than let them pay those premiums pre-tax. That BLOWS.
But he's also planning to give you a $5000 tax credit to offset this. If you run the numbers, it comes out in your favor. Here goes: Say your health care plan at work costs $12,000 per year. Currently, that's tax-free money. Now, regardless of how much of this you pay directly, the fact is that you pay all of it indirectly through lower wages. So you're currently paying $12k per year tax-free. Under the McCain plan, that $12k would be taxed. If your company continued to pick this up, the cost to them (i.e., to you) would be about $4k, which is more than offset by the $5k tax credit you get. If your company dropped your health coverage, then you'd have the additional $12k in wages, plus the $5k tax credit, to buy health care on your own.
Buying health care on your own may seem scary, but we have to switch to doing this if we're going to save health care in this country. Getting it through your employer not only distorts the market (since the insurance company's customers aren't really you, but your employer), but also creates all sorts of problems when you change employers. The system we have is a crazy holdover from WWII - you can look it up.
Columbus was backed by a government and made several trips back and forth. It was only after he went that settlers followed.
Not only that - plenty of American settlers went back home. Check out the history of the first Roanoke colony. (The first one, not the one mysteriously wiped out that left only the word Croatoan carved into a tree. The first one was taken home by Walter Raleigh when they realized they were in over their heads.)
An oil producer like Exxon is a bad example since there isn't much surplus capacity at present, and the demand curve is inelastic (even when the price goes up, people don't buy much less of it). So you're pretty much right - even a lower tax rate on Exxon probably wouldn't change their net revenue much.
In most situations, though, a lower corporate tax rate would reduce prices for consumers across the board. Suppose Company X and Company Y both sell a product for $14 (with no direct sales tax) which has a production cost of $10. They pay $2 in corporate taxes. If the tax is eliminated, then according to the law of supply and demand, the companies will increase supply and cut prices until a new equilibrium price is reached (somewhere between $12 and $14). The $2 in previous corporate taxes will be split between the people paying lower prices and the company.
So essentially, you're both right, in different proportions depending on the situation.
You're being extremely obtuse, Falcon, if you think that I'm even talking about polyamory in the liberal West. Nothing I've said thus far is even any sort of criticism of that lifestyle. I'm talking about polygamous cultures, not a niche subculture that has at best tiny effects on the broader monogamous culture in which it's embedded.
Fair enough, but then we're back to the point that the women have to be able to remarry. In your example you essentially have three cohorts of each sex: M0 and W0 are men and women below the marriage age; M1 is young men; W1 is young women; M2 is old men; W2 is old women. For simplicity, assume all six cohorts are identical in size, and that in one tick of the clock, M2 and W2 die out, a new M0 and W0 are born, and each Mi becomes M(i+1). OK?
Then at the start of the game, M2 is married to W1 and W2. One tick goes by and all of M2 dies off, as does W2. W1 becomes W2, and all of this cohort are widows. W0 becomes W1, M0 becomes M1, and M1 becomes M2. Then the new M2 marries W1, and can only marry W2 if those widows can remarry.
All this is pretty obvious if you look at it from the woman's point of view: if she's married for 2X years while her husband is only married to her for X years, then pretty plainly she's married serially to two men.
So yes, your math works out with this caveat. The problem is that this toy society we've built has been simplified out of what actually exists in the world.
The problem is that this only works if the sex ratio favors women, which typically only happens if not all young men reach old age. So it doesn't "just delay the age at which a guy can marry". Rather, it prevents significant numbers of young men from ever marrying; they die before reaching the age at which the sex ratio is reversed.
The average pregnancy ratio might be close to 51:49 (with no intervention women outnumber men from birth) but to say it's an even split worldwide is just ignorant. Some cultures value women so little female babies are aborted and so the balance has become so off kilter even WITHOUT polygamy that many men go without wives.
Actually men outnumber women at birth, but I'll assume that was a typo instead of "ignorance". Clearly there are societies which skew the ratio by abortion, and war-torn or otherwise violent societies which may have have skewed sex ratios.
But even in highly-skewed societies, it's rare for the ratio to exceed, say, 110:100 or to be much below 1:1. But as I mentioned earlier: this doesn't help your case. In a society in which men already outnumber women, polygamy (polygyny) only exacerbates the situation. And societies in which women outnumber men are quite rare. Your example of Russia is good, but even there it's only 94:100 among people aged 15-65, and a normal ratio of 106:100 exists among under-15s.
When reading this list, note that countries with low life expectancies often have more women than men in the 15-65 category because so many men die before age 65. If you look at the numbers at birth, though, you'll find not a single one below 1:1.
Perhaps a look at Love unlimited: The polyamorists will disavow that.
Fascinating, but polyamory in San Francisco isn't exactly a representative sample of polygamy worldwide. Is it so hard to accept that in most polygamous societies, there are large numbers of single (and frustrated!) men, and the status of women is not high? How is this even slightly controversial?
What the hell does that say for monogamous society?
I suspect not much, and the reason why is the key bit in the article, which is "controlling for socioeconomic factors..." The problem here is that, in the modern world, there just aren't any polygamous societies that are wealthy, liberal democracies. I'm not being judgmental about it - that's just the way it is. So the "controlling" part is likely to be pretty extreme.
Are we looking at the tiny percentage in polygamous societies that do have a Western-style living standard? Because it's all those other (poorer) single men who are probably going to be killing each other off, not the rich few at the top. So no big surprise there.
Or are we looking at the society as a whole, but extrapolating life expectancy at living standard X out to what it "would be" under living standard Y? I would be extremely dubious of any such extrapolation.
Finally, just because polygamy "contributes" to violence - and I think it does - it certainly isn't the only thing that contributes. There are most likely factors that contribute significantly more. My claim is not really all that strong - I'm mostly just answering the fellow who asserted that polygamy is "beneficial for all those involved". I'm pretty convinced that it isn't.
You want a source on the fact that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women? Where are you from, Alpha Centauri? (BTW, at birth, worldwide, the human sex ratio is about 105 boys to 100 girls. It's slightly lower, about 101:100, during the sexually active years. All this does is increase the number of single men, making polygamy even less attractive.)
Your point about sexual orientation is immaterial. If polygamy is widespread enough to leave large numbers of men single, the fact that some small percentage of them will be gay is not going to change this fact.
Your point about no interest in marriage is irrelevant. What matters is whether men can find a mate, not whether they can actually marry. Even without marriage, if 25% of the men have no available mate, they have no choice in the matter.
Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1). There is also some evidence that having large numbers of single men contributes to violence (this should come as no surprise). Hence, polygamy probably contributes to violence.
Furthermore, while from a strictly materialistic point of view, polygamy is beneficial to women (since richer men tend to have more wives and can support them better on average), I don't think there's a lot of evidence that these women are "better off" from a liberal Western point of view. They are probably not going to be well educated or in the work force, for example.
Labor scarcity implies a market for laborers in which the laborers get to exercise a choice other than "work or die (or at least be beaten)".
Exactly what I've been saying all along.
And in despotic systems... when you have a dirty job that you don't pay a "fair market rate" for, history says you will force the powerless or less powerful to do the job at whatever rate you deem acceptable.
To an extent that's true, and black slavery in the US is certainly an example of this. I don't discount the value of government to enforce laws - it isn't all economics, after all. Economics takes a long time (on the human scale) to work. But I think you substantially overreach when you assert what "history says". Slavery is not a good example for you, because it mostly takes advantage of abundant labor pools elsewhere to satisfy a shortage of native cheap labor. So you may be technically correct that a labor shortage could "lead" to slavery, but not of the laborers who are in short supply, which is what we're talking about.
The earlier example you brought up of illegal aliens on US farms is a similar case. The farmers are able to circumvent a shortage of native labor by importing cheap foreign labor. It's up to government to prevent this, just like it's up to government to prevent enslavement of foreign nationals, etc.
Over time, the older undying would take themselves out of the labor pool via the accumulation of wealth and power, leaving the younger folks and the normal folks to the labor pool. At some point in time, there will be a tipping point where the undying will outnumber the rest, and the rest may not be so enthusiastic about working for them, so the likely recourse will be slavery or indentured servitude.
The problem with that whole argument is that it simply ignores economics. Sure, if returns to labor and capital remain constant, the "undying" will get wealthier without bound, and the number of laborers will grow ever smaller. But what happens here is that labor will grow rarer and hence more valuable, and capital will grow more abundant and hence less valuable. So the return to labor will rise and the return to capital will fall. That means the aging investors will not get so rich, and the young workers will get richer. (I'm not saying they'll be equally rich. I am saying that there's a powerful force countering the trend you foresee.)
What do US farmers do in response to labor scarcity with crop pickers? They don't raise labor rates. They import foreign (illegal) workers that work below market rate and have fewer legal recourses for unsafe working conditions.
But again, that's not labor scarcity. It's a vast number of laborers who, while de jure illegal, are de facto allowed to work here. Of course farmers are going to hire the cheapest labor available. If the US government eliminated the illegals (by any means: amnesty, deportation, whatever), what do you think would happen? Would farmers re-enslave blacks (or some other group), or would they be forced to pay more and pass the cost along to consumers?
When the Spanish landed in the new world and needed people to work the sugar plantations, they didn't put fliers out in the cities of Europe. They imported slaves from Africa. Same thing with the silver mines in Mexico, except there they used native slave labor.
You seem to be misunderstanding what "labor scarcity" means. From the Spanish perspective, there was no scarcity. There was a huge number of potential laborers in Africa and Mexico who just needed to be put to productive (for the Spanish) work. As long as slaves could be obtained cheaply (because of abundance), there was no incentive for the Spanish to improve working conditions or hire relatively expensive Europeans.
The experience of black slaves in America is another example of my point. The slave trade was banned relatively early in American history (1808). From that point forward, the condition of black slaves in the US improved as they grew more valuable. Obviously, they did remain slaves for another 57 years. But they lived much better than, say, black slaves in the Caribbean who could be cheaply replaced by more slaves from Africa.
The problem is, serfdom itself originally arose from labor scarcity during the Roman empire.
That's only true if you call a shortage of actual slaves a condition of "labor scarcity". What happened was that with the shortage of slaves, more Roman citizens shifted into that sort of labor. That's certainly not evidence of overall scarcity.
Replying to your later post: Actually, the Black Death had a lot to do with it, and so did labor scarcity. If you look at the pattern of serfdom this is clear: prior to the Black Death, serfdom was common in the West (where there was plenty of labor) and uncommon in the East (where there wasn't, and lords tried to encourage eastward migration). After the Black Death, labor in the West become more scarce and serfdom collapsed, while populations swelled in the East and serfdom came into practice (not to be eliminated there until the 19th century in many places).
If you have some evidence to the contrary, please present it - just saying "No, that didn't happen" isn't convincing.
The traditional (historical) recourse to labor scarcity has been slavery or indentured servitude.
As DarkSarin points out, this is exactly backwards. Cf the effects of the Black Death on Europe - vastly increased power flowing to serfs (leading to the end of serfdom itself).
It's hard to imagine what the financial world would look like!
It's not really that hard to imagine, given some knowledge of the assumptions used. For example, if we assume that people follow patterns typical to early-21st century America (study until 22, then work until 65, then retire until death), then as the period of retirement lengthens, we will see more and more capital and less and less labor. The result is economically obvious: returns to labor (i.e. wages) will increase and returns to capital (i.e. stock market gains, dividends, etc.) will decrease. What happens to inflation depends (as always) on the money supply, which is a separate issue.
You can be certain that it won't be possible to drop $1,000 in "the bank", watch it grow at (say) 1% after inflation for 1,000 years, and end up with $20 million in then-current dollars. Interest rates on demand deposits usually don't exceed inflation; interest rates on CDs do, but have a fixed lifetime. Would you buy a 1,000-year CD? What are the odds the bank will even be around after 1,000 years? Or that you will be (given accidents and other unforeseeable events)?
Regardless, what seems much more likely is that if people really can live 1,000 years, people will not follow our current pattern of study-work-retire-die. Rather, it will become study-work-retire-study-work-retire-etc. You might become sick of your job after 75 years, so quit for a while, learn a new trade, and start that. You've got plenty of time, after all.
A question I'd also like to see raised is what are the social implications? What would happen to monogamy, for example? Heinlein discusses this a bit in Methuselah's Children and at more length in Time Enough For Love.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea, but untrue. Real wages have not been falling.
I must revise my statistics. According to the IRS, for 2006 (latest year available online) the numbers look about like this:
AGI %returns %income %taxes
1MM and up 0.3 15.1 26.7
500k-1MM 0.4 5.0 9.2
200-500k 2.2 11.1 17.3
100-200k 8.8 20.0 20.4
50-100k 21.6 26.4 18.0
$1 to 50k 66.7 22.4 8.4
So the top 2.9% of returns by AGI earned over $200k, totaling about 31.2% of all wages, and paid 53.2% of all income taxes.
(BTW, man I hate Slashdot's lack of support for the table tag!!!!)
If that were true, then you'd expect the same pattern to be pretty consistent over time, right? But it's not - it used to be the case that more wage-earners paid at least something. Even low wage-earners should be paying some taxes, if for no other reason to make sure they have a stake in tax policy.
That may be true, but it's an extraordinarily small class of people. You might find a few rich retirees who have all their money in municipal bonds and live off the tax free interest, but even they are effectively paying taxes by accepting the lower interest rates on those bonds. (And these people, I might add, are not WAGE EARNERS.)
If your point is that rich people should pay more taxes than poor, then OK. My point is that they already do, vastly more. If your point is that we should clean up the tax code to prevent loopholes, then I couldn't agree more. But this has nothing to do with Obama's vs. McCain's tax plans, neither of which looks likely to reduce the 67,000 pages of the current U.S. Tax Code.
I didn't say they would. You'd still have $17k (minus taxes) to buy health coverage, and even now you can get a pretty damn good individual policy for that.
Please. That's bullshit. The system is currently set up to favor employer-provided health care because that's almost the only game in town. Open up the market a bit and there's no reason whatsoever individual health insurance won't be as competitively priced as individual car insurance. Do you think your car insurance should be paid for by your employer?
None. But they will have a good reason: the fear that I'll go elsewhere.
Great, but most of the people Obama considers "rich" aren't CEOs and aren't making 400x the average worker. So this point is entirely irrelevant.
The point that IS relevant, to me at least, is that already about 60% of our taxes are paid by the top 5% of wage earners. Over a third of all wage-earners pay no income tax at all. How is this remotely fair? Obama wants to shift the burden even more onto the top wage-earners, and calls that "more fair". Rubbish.
But he's also planning to give you a $5000 tax credit to offset this. If you run the numbers, it comes out in your favor. Here goes: Say your health care plan at work costs $12,000 per year. Currently, that's tax-free money. Now, regardless of how much of this you pay directly, the fact is that you pay all of it indirectly through lower wages. So you're currently paying $12k per year tax-free. Under the McCain plan, that $12k would be taxed. If your company continued to pick this up, the cost to them (i.e., to you) would be about $4k, which is more than offset by the $5k tax credit you get. If your company dropped your health coverage, then you'd have the additional $12k in wages, plus the $5k tax credit, to buy health care on your own.
Buying health care on your own may seem scary, but we have to switch to doing this if we're going to save health care in this country. Getting it through your employer not only distorts the market (since the insurance company's customers aren't really you, but your employer), but also creates all sorts of problems when you change employers. The system we have is a crazy holdover from WWII - you can look it up.
An odd complaint. I think I want my government executioners to be bunglers. Indicates a lack of practice.
Not only that - plenty of American settlers went back home. Check out the history of the first Roanoke colony. (The first one, not the one mysteriously wiped out that left only the word Croatoan carved into a tree. The first one was taken home by Walter Raleigh when they realized they were in over their heads.)
An oil producer like Exxon is a bad example since there isn't much surplus capacity at present, and the demand curve is inelastic (even when the price goes up, people don't buy much less of it). So you're pretty much right - even a lower tax rate on Exxon probably wouldn't change their net revenue much.
In most situations, though, a lower corporate tax rate would reduce prices for consumers across the board. Suppose Company X and Company Y both sell a product for $14 (with no direct sales tax) which has a production cost of $10. They pay $2 in corporate taxes. If the tax is eliminated, then according to the law of supply and demand, the companies will increase supply and cut prices until a new equilibrium price is reached (somewhere between $12 and $14). The $2 in previous corporate taxes will be split between the people paying lower prices and the company.
So essentially, you're both right, in different proportions depending on the situation.
You're being extremely obtuse, Falcon, if you think that I'm even talking about polyamory in the liberal West. Nothing I've said thus far is even any sort of criticism of that lifestyle. I'm talking about polygamous cultures, not a niche subculture that has at best tiny effects on the broader monogamous culture in which it's embedded.
Fair enough, but then we're back to the point that the women have to be able to remarry. In your example you essentially have three cohorts of each sex: M0 and W0 are men and women below the marriage age; M1 is young men; W1 is young women; M2 is old men; W2 is old women. For simplicity, assume all six cohorts are identical in size, and that in one tick of the clock, M2 and W2 die out, a new M0 and W0 are born, and each Mi becomes M(i+1). OK?
Then at the start of the game, M2 is married to W1 and W2. One tick goes by and all of M2 dies off, as does W2. W1 becomes W2, and all of this cohort are widows. W0 becomes W1, M0 becomes M1, and M1 becomes M2. Then the new M2 marries W1, and can only marry W2 if those widows can remarry.
All this is pretty obvious if you look at it from the woman's point of view: if she's married for 2X years while her husband is only married to her for X years, then pretty plainly she's married serially to two men.
So yes, your math works out with this caveat. The problem is that this toy society we've built has been simplified out of what actually exists in the world.
The problem is that this only works if the sex ratio favors women, which typically only happens if not all young men reach old age. So it doesn't "just delay the age at which a guy can marry". Rather, it prevents significant numbers of young men from ever marrying; they die before reaching the age at which the sex ratio is reversed.
Sorry, but that doesn't help at all. Give it a little thought and you'll see why.
Actually men outnumber women at birth, but I'll assume that was a typo instead of "ignorance". Clearly there are societies which skew the ratio by abortion, and war-torn or otherwise violent societies which may have have skewed sex ratios.
But even in highly-skewed societies, it's rare for the ratio to exceed, say, 110:100 or to be much below 1:1. But as I mentioned earlier: this doesn't help your case. In a society in which men already outnumber women, polygamy (polygyny) only exacerbates the situation. And societies in which women outnumber men are quite rare. Your example of Russia is good, but even there it's only 94:100 among people aged 15-65, and a normal ratio of 106:100 exists among under-15s.
List of countries by sex ratio.
When reading this list, note that countries with low life expectancies often have more women than men in the 15-65 category because so many men die before age 65. If you look at the numbers at birth, though, you'll find not a single one below 1:1.
Fascinating, but polyamory in San Francisco isn't exactly a representative sample of polygamy worldwide. Is it so hard to accept that in most polygamous societies, there are large numbers of single (and frustrated!) men, and the status of women is not high? How is this even slightly controversial?
I suspect not much, and the reason why is the key bit in the article, which is "controlling for socioeconomic factors..." The problem here is that, in the modern world, there just aren't any polygamous societies that are wealthy, liberal democracies. I'm not being judgmental about it - that's just the way it is. So the "controlling" part is likely to be pretty extreme.
Are we looking at the tiny percentage in polygamous societies that do have a Western-style living standard? Because it's all those other (poorer) single men who are probably going to be killing each other off, not the rich few at the top. So no big surprise there.
Or are we looking at the society as a whole, but extrapolating life expectancy at living standard X out to what it "would be" under living standard Y? I would be extremely dubious of any such extrapolation.
Finally, just because polygamy "contributes" to violence - and I think it does - it certainly isn't the only thing that contributes. There are most likely factors that contribute significantly more. My claim is not really all that strong - I'm mostly just answering the fellow who asserted that polygamy is "beneficial for all those involved". I'm pretty convinced that it isn't.
You want a source on the fact that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women? Where are you from, Alpha Centauri? (BTW, at birth, worldwide, the human sex ratio is about 105 boys to 100 girls. It's slightly lower, about 101:100, during the sexually active years. All this does is increase the number of single men, making polygamy even less attractive.)
Your point about sexual orientation is immaterial. If polygamy is widespread enough to leave large numbers of men single, the fact that some small percentage of them will be gay is not going to change this fact.
Your point about no interest in marriage is irrelevant. What matters is whether men can find a mate, not whether they can actually marry. Even without marriage, if 25% of the men have no available mate, they have no choice in the matter.
Interesting blog article about this issue.
Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1). There is also some evidence that having large numbers of single men contributes to violence (this should come as no surprise). Hence, polygamy probably contributes to violence.
Furthermore, while from a strictly materialistic point of view, polygamy is beneficial to women (since richer men tend to have more wives and can support them better on average), I don't think there's a lot of evidence that these women are "better off" from a liberal Western point of view. They are probably not going to be well educated or in the work force, for example.
Hey, congratulations on that. With 60% more people you produce 21.5% more stuff. Nice job, guys!
Exactly what I've been saying all along.
To an extent that's true, and black slavery in the US is certainly an example of this. I don't discount the value of government to enforce laws - it isn't all economics, after all. Economics takes a long time (on the human scale) to work. But I think you substantially overreach when you assert what "history says". Slavery is not a good example for you, because it mostly takes advantage of abundant labor pools elsewhere to satisfy a shortage of native cheap labor. So you may be technically correct that a labor shortage could "lead" to slavery, but not of the laborers who are in short supply, which is what we're talking about.
The earlier example you brought up of illegal aliens on US farms is a similar case. The farmers are able to circumvent a shortage of native labor by importing cheap foreign labor. It's up to government to prevent this, just like it's up to government to prevent enslavement of foreign nationals, etc.
The problem with that whole argument is that it simply ignores economics. Sure, if returns to labor and capital remain constant, the "undying" will get wealthier without bound, and the number of laborers will grow ever smaller. But what happens here is that labor will grow rarer and hence more valuable, and capital will grow more abundant and hence less valuable. So the return to labor will rise and the return to capital will fall. That means the aging investors will not get so rich, and the young workers will get richer. (I'm not saying they'll be equally rich. I am saying that there's a powerful force countering the trend you foresee.)
But again, that's not labor scarcity. It's a vast number of laborers who, while de jure illegal, are de facto allowed to work here. Of course farmers are going to hire the cheapest labor available. If the US government eliminated the illegals (by any means: amnesty, deportation, whatever), what do you think would happen? Would farmers re-enslave blacks (or some other group), or would they be forced to pay more and pass the cost along to consumers?
You seem to be misunderstanding what "labor scarcity" means. From the Spanish perspective, there was no scarcity. There was a huge number of potential laborers in Africa and Mexico who just needed to be put to productive (for the Spanish) work. As long as slaves could be obtained cheaply (because of abundance), there was no incentive for the Spanish to improve working conditions or hire relatively expensive Europeans.
The experience of black slaves in America is another example of my point. The slave trade was banned relatively early in American history (1808). From that point forward, the condition of black slaves in the US improved as they grew more valuable. Obviously, they did remain slaves for another 57 years. But they lived much better than, say, black slaves in the Caribbean who could be cheaply replaced by more slaves from Africa.
That's only true if you call a shortage of actual slaves a condition of "labor scarcity". What happened was that with the shortage of slaves, more Roman citizens shifted into that sort of labor. That's certainly not evidence of overall scarcity.
Replying to your later post: Actually, the Black Death had a lot to do with it, and so did labor scarcity. If you look at the pattern of serfdom this is clear: prior to the Black Death, serfdom was common in the West (where there was plenty of labor) and uncommon in the East (where there wasn't, and lords tried to encourage eastward migration). After the Black Death, labor in the West become more scarce and serfdom collapsed, while populations swelled in the East and serfdom came into practice (not to be eliminated there until the 19th century in many places).
If you have some evidence to the contrary, please present it - just saying "No, that didn't happen" isn't convincing.
As DarkSarin points out, this is exactly backwards. Cf the effects of the Black Death on Europe - vastly increased power flowing to serfs (leading to the end of serfdom itself).
It's not really that hard to imagine, given some knowledge of the assumptions used. For example, if we assume that people follow patterns typical to early-21st century America (study until 22, then work until 65, then retire until death), then as the period of retirement lengthens, we will see more and more capital and less and less labor. The result is economically obvious: returns to labor (i.e. wages) will increase and returns to capital (i.e. stock market gains, dividends, etc.) will decrease. What happens to inflation depends (as always) on the money supply, which is a separate issue.
You can be certain that it won't be possible to drop $1,000 in "the bank", watch it grow at (say) 1% after inflation for 1,000 years, and end up with $20 million in then-current dollars. Interest rates on demand deposits usually don't exceed inflation; interest rates on CDs do, but have a fixed lifetime. Would you buy a 1,000-year CD? What are the odds the bank will even be around after 1,000 years? Or that you will be (given accidents and other unforeseeable events)?
Regardless, what seems much more likely is that if people really can live 1,000 years, people will not follow our current pattern of study-work-retire-die. Rather, it will become study-work-retire-study-work-retire-etc. You might become sick of your job after 75 years, so quit for a while, learn a new trade, and start that. You've got plenty of time, after all.
A question I'd also like to see raised is what are the social implications? What would happen to monogamy, for example? Heinlein discusses this a bit in Methuselah's Children and at more length in Time Enough For Love.